Weaver's commitment, clout win the day for city

Early in his career as general manager of the Jacksonville Jaguars, Michael Huyghue
was driving through one of the city’s grittier sections when he spotted team
owner Wayne Weaver’s car. Without a cell phone and hoping to catch up on
some pressing business, Huyghue tailed Weaver’s $100,000 BMW — right
up to the drive-through window of a Krystal fast-food restaurant.

“I was surprised to see the owner of an NFL team in this rocket ship of a
car pulling into a burger joint,” said Huyghue, noting how the “common
man” in Weaver was craving fast food, “but Wayne wasn’t concerned
with that. He just didn’t want me to tell his wife he was eating burgers.”

Aside from having made a fortune with three different shoe businesses, the Nine
West and Shoe Carnival chains and wholesale distributor Liz Claiborne shoes, Weaver,
70, is that fellow in the Rudyard Kipling poem “If,” the one who “walks
with kings” yet retains “the common touch.” In a league where owners
now buy franchises costing hundreds of millions of dollars largely for ego purposes,
Weaver is one with a low profile who wields significant influence.

So if you’re wondering at all this week what in the world the Super Bowl
is doing in Jacksonville — the smallest city ever to host the sports spectacle
— it can be traced to the pull that Weaver has among the billionaire boys
club of NFL owners, influence he has developed over a mere 10 years as the Jaguars’
chairman and CEO.

“It took someone like Wayne Weaver — a man with his clout and credibility
among ownership — to get everyone to even consider Jacksonville,” said
New England Patriots Vice Chairman Jonathan Kraft. “His commitment and dedication
are the reason the Super Bowl is there.”

‘A knack for engaging people’

Weaver, a high school graduate, has worked his way into a position of enough respect
among NFL owners that they

Jaguars owner Wayne Weaver (left), with NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue in May, has earned credibility as "a self-made guy" in a small market, the Browns' John Collins says.

feel comfortable handing him their showcase event.
But when you ask him to talk about himself, you get an “aw shucks” kind
of response. “The smartest thing I’ve learned in 50 years of business
is to hire smart people and get out of their way,” he said.

Ask people around the NFL about Weaver, and the word that keeps coming up is “credibility.”
As an owner in the NFL’s second-smallest market (some call it the smallest,
feeling we shouldn’t even count Green Bay, since its legions of fans spread
far beyond its municipal borders), he’s earned the respect of influential
owners like Bob Kraft, Jerry Jones and Pat Bowlen and has come to represent the
interest of every medium- and small-market team.

Typically self-effacing, Weaver calls his political clout within league circles
a mere twist of fate. “I’m a voice for the small market because that’s
who I am,” he insists.

No one buys that explanation. “He’s a self-made guy making it work in
one of our smallest markets,” said Cleveland Browns President John Collins,
who worked with Weaver while serving as the league’s senior vice president
of marketing and sales. “That’s earned him enormous credibility across
the league.”

Weaver and the Jaguars also turned heads with success on the field. In the first
five years, the team had four playoff appearances and two division title games.
Lately, Weaver has gone through the typical cyclical life of an NFL owner, as
the team suffered four straight losing seasons from 2000 through 2003 and saw
eroding fan support. But the team finished 9-7 this year and just missed the playoffs,
while attendance shot up by 29.8 percent.

But it was his start in the league that got everyone’s attention. With Weaver
moving quickly onto the NFL Properties committee (since morphed into the NFL’s
Business Ventures group) his influence grew as his skill at problem solving and
consensus building was demonstrated while serving on a committee with some of
the league’s most acrimonious owners.

“It’s give and take, being patient and not trying to be the loudest
voice in the room,” Weaver said when asked about getting the likes of Jones
and Dan Snyder to agree with other owners on all sorts of disparate issues.

He must have had the right formula. Over the last five years, “Wayne Weaver
has become one of the real influence peddlers in the league behind the scenes,”
said Mark Holtzman, NFL senior vice president of consumer products, who worked
closely with Weaver when the league was reshaping its consumer products business
in 1999-2000.

Holtzman added, “Many times, he’s been the guy who takes the old guard
and the new guard and finds common ground.”

Perhaps Weaver was miscast as a builder of retail empires. Those who work with
him say his greatest ability is to galvanize groups and motivate them to action.

“He could build a consensus in just about any group,” said Deron Cherry,
a six-time Pro Bowl safety with the Kansas City Chiefs who’s now a Jaguars
limited partner. “Wayne just has a knack for engaging people regardless of
who they are. When you have that knack, you have a knack for getting anything
done.”

That sounds more like a politician or a soldier. However, those career choices
wouldn’t mesh with Weaver’s populist bent.

“He can relate to people on the most common of levels and diffuse them so
they forget they are talking to a wealthy businessman,”

Weaver and his wife Delores have been a force in the Jacksonville community.

Huyghue said.

Consequently, if Weaver is trying to find out about office automation, he’s
not shy about talking to the custodian. If he’s trying to find out how bad
traffic is on game days, he’ll talk to cabbies.

Befitting a man who’s triumphed in the foxholes of retailing, Weaver is also
lauded for his business instincts.

“He’s one of the most intuitive marketers I’ve ever met,”
said Holtzman. “Obviously, he understands retail, but certain people, whether
they have an MBA or not, just have a great understanding in their gut as to what
the right marketing decisions are.”

Added Huyghue, “Wayne’s got an intangible gut instinct that most very
successful business people have. That’s something usually not taught at academic
institutions.”

Bringing the game home

He also can talk NFL owners into bringing their jewel event in sports to his hometown.
The city was awarded the 2005 game on Nov. 1, 2000, in a close vote among league
owners, an outcome that took some observers by surprise. After the city was granted
the game, many owners cited Weaver’s respect within league circles as the
reason, plus Weaver’s belief that the Super Bowl would help lead to $60 million
worth of renovation to Alltel Stadium, including a newly renovated club and suite
level.

So how was he really able to get this group to move the game away from its steady
rotation of Miami, New Orleans and San Diego to the small city along the St. John’s
River?

By convincing them that it would be good for the Super Bowl to travel, and that
if it could be in Jacksonville, maybe it could be anywhere.

“Wayne can convince you in a hurry that he wants what’s best for the
league, so you have a tendency to listen,” said Green Bay Packers President
Bob Harlan. “Look where we go next year — Detroit.”

Added NFL COO Roger Goodell, “[Weaver] attacked it directly and showed us
why it would be good for the NFL. I think his sheer force of will got our ownership
to say Wayne Weaver will make this successful.”

Weaver recalled first envisioning a Super Bowl for Jacksonville in 1999 after
another heady playoff run for the young franchise.

“We were pretty full of ourselves and everyone was kind of tongue in cheek
at the beginning because of the size of this market,” said Weaver. “But
they were that way about the team in the beginning, too.”

Weaver said he got buy-in from league heavyweights like Goodell and Commissioner
Paul Tagliabue earlier than he thought. The Super Bowl owners committee was more
problematic, suspect of Jacksonville’s size, the weather and the logistical
problems of replacing hotel rooms with ship cabins. “Miami, San Diego, New
Orleans, we tried to convince them, ‘been there, done that,’” Weaver
said. Still, in the end it was less, “‘why not us?’ and more, ‘think
different.’ It was more ‘think out of the box with us’ and if the
Super Bowl could be here, it could perhaps travel to any NFL town,” Weaver
said. “That’s what I think we’ll prove here.”